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jeudi 21 mars 2013

Five Project Management Mistakes

A lire sur: Method123

The
following series of five emails describes the five most common project
management mistakes.

Have you ever attended an end-of-project meeting
on a project that had major problems? If you have, chances are that one of the
major themes you will hear is that we should have spent more time
planning.

Five Project
Management Mistakes

#1: Inadequate Planning

I have heard project managers say that the time
they spend planning could be better spent actually "doing the work". This is not
right. Before the project work begins, the project manager must make sure that the work
is properly understood and agreed to by the project sponsor and key
stakeholders. The larger the project, the more
important it is that this information be defined formally and explicitly. When
you think about it, many project problems can be traced to problems in planning.
These include

Poor estimates based on not
understanding the totality of the work.

Lack of scope change
management because scope was not properly defined to begin
with.

Issues occurring because of
poor risk management.

Missing work because the
schedule is not thought out.

Not understanding all the
stakeholders involved.

It
should not be surprising, then, that the best way to avoid this problem is to do
a good job of planning the project up-front. There are four main components to
the planning process.

Defining the work. You need to
understand the nature of the project including objectives, scope,
assumptions, risks, budget, timeline, organization and overall approach.

Understanding the schedule. You should create a
project schedule before the project starts. This is needed to help you determine
how to complete the work, and to estimate
the total project effort and duration.

Estimating costs. You and the sponsor need
a good estimate of costs before the project gets going.

Agree on project management
processes. This will include how the
project manager will manage scope, issues, risks, communication, schedule, etc.

People ask me how much time it takes to complete
the project planning. The answer is "sufficient". You need to spend the time to
define the work, create a schedule, estimate the costs and set up the project
management processes. If your project is small, this should not take much time.
If your project is large the planning may take a log time. In other words,
planning is scalable based on the size of the project.

Spending time on good planning ends up taking much
less time and effort than having to correct the problems while the project is
underway. We all know this to be the case. We just need to practice this on our
projects.